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Talk:Zumwalt's Skirmish Room/@comment-27404954-20160913235826/@comment-27404954-20160916070845
As the Z-40s fly in on their attack runs, they do not recall the awful lessons that their compatriots had learned previously -- or they thought themselves safe. In either case, the Aneph aircraft over New Antioch climb out of range of the Protoss AA as the trucks set up, and the Z-40s aim directly for the city. The miles slowly tick down until they can fire, but then thousands of laser bursts from Aneph flak tanks within the city light the skies, the 120mm laser rounds far outranging the targeting range of the transphasic missiles. The Z-40s desperately break formation in order not to be hit after the first squadron's worth of planes is sheared apart in seconds, but the flak tanks' targeting software was designed to calculate lead on speeds up to aircraft using sublight engines. The obsolete Z-40s were all too easy, and within a minute, the Aneph AAT-1s had torn the formations to pieces. And as the red-hot debris fell from the sky, sizzling, hundreds of rockets screamed away from fortified positions. While the Aneph soldiers had more or less invariably managed to get to cover in time -- tank crews and that of other armored vehicles being entirely unaffected by the gases -- the artillery tanks outside the city still kept firing. But not for long. Though the Protoss artillery kept rearranging themselves, they could not spare the time to emerge from cover to fire, as the Aneph forces' counter-fire was too intense in its suppression. Though the load was primarily high-explosive, some of the rockets were tipped with cooled O2F2, and on impact, the oxidant flared and ignited among the forestation and underbrush the Protoss were using for cover. Within moments, miles of forest was burning from the barrage, and the Protoss gave up firing to simply protect themselves. But in their retreat from the forest into the plains around New Antioch, they could not fire or take cover, and it was now that the Aneph air cover plummeted down through the atmosphere. Some Protoss AA units stopped in the middle of the plains to open fire, but they were swiftly cut down by missiles and plasma canister cannons. Griffon fighters and Chrysaor bombers -- both easily capable of puncturing Protoss tanks' armor, -- ripped through the fleeing infantry and artillery, their blink modules turning them away from AA that brushed too close for comfort to their wings or tails, and their CMT cores allowing them to pull maneuvers close enough to the ground that the Protoss gunners could not depress their guns enough to hit them. Any planes that had not already used their synchrotron weaponry did now; the combustion-halting process was equally as effective versus tank engines as plane engines. Earth fountained upwards amidst shards of shattered stone and pulverized metal as high-explosive bombs blew apart tank columns and artillery pieces. And from orbit, drop pods hit among the shut-down tanks, disgorging Project Kappa monsters like some nightmare flower blooming from its bud. As the plains turned into some moon-like hellscape from the relentless bombardments, the Kappa units took their prey into the forest. In the forest, they would eat the former crew of the Protoss tanks... and once that food supply was exhausted, from the screaming men in their burning vehicles, the Kappas would wait patiently in the forest -- skirting the areas burnt to ash -- for their next meals. The Protoss troops who had initially assaulted New Antioch were now caught between the monsters waiting for them in the forest, and the machine-guns and rocket launchers waiting ahead in the city. As night fell over Helios, the sky burned with fires fed by the dead and the dying. And far, far up in orbit, the Aneph assault commander lowered his headset and toasted his troops' performance with a glass of blood-red wine.